Chapter 1Introduction

Many years ago, while wandering through the aisles of a small public library, abook whose title I can no longer recall ended up in my hands. The book’s generalargument also escapes me now, but a scenario described therein stayed with me.Imagine, the author proposed, a prehistoric time, a pristine landscape, and aband of early humans, who can communicate with each other in a more thanrudimentary way, moving purposely toward the mountainous range before them.The seasons are changing, and they must follow the migrating herds they huntin order to survive. Their journey quickly leads them to the foot of mountainwhere they have to make a choice: should they cross over the snow-coveredpeak of the mountain, braving the elements and the craggy terrain, or shouldthey take the far longer path around the mountain, braving the wild animals thatprey in its deep forests? The author imagined that it was at a moment like thisthat leaders emerged; each would make the case for one or the other path, andit would be for the rest of their party to choose whom to follow. The author, if Irecall correctly, proposed that this was the birth of rhetoric. With their lives inthe balance, the stakes of the choice made couldn’t be higher, and the leaders, inarticulating the reasons for their position, probably each won adherents, whichalso created factions within the group. Carrying the scenario further, the authorproposed that this was probably also how clans emerged, and eventually, withsocial and biological evolution, so did entire cultural groups.

I begin my own book with this anecdote because it encapsulates the impor-tance of discourse in human lives. It is through our use of language that not onlydo we get things done collectively but also through it that we co-identify socially.It is not only what we say, but how we choose to say it, that influences thosearound us, and this basic observation generates ripples in the pond of discursivetheory.The concentric circles widen as they move from the center, and we are ledto the foundational tenet of the issues addressed in this book: discursive practicesare socio-culturally defining in so far as they mediate our perceptions of our sit-uations, ourselves, and those around us. To study discourse, then, is to study howwe humans negotiate meaning with each other, and, by extension, the underlyingreasons for the breakdown of such a negotiation. For this reason, any contributionto the study of language use – what is generally understood by the phrase “thesociology of language” – in regard to any community stands to benefit us all; thediscursive differences, just as the similarities, that we uncover when we examine

2 Introduction

language use analytically and critically are not only contributions to our gen-eral compendium of knowledge but a potential key to ensuring social progress,equity, understanding, and justice in so far as we are willing to recognize that dis-course is a tool by which we fashion and generally manipulate our social realities.

In a recent publication, the prolific discourse analyst Teun Van Dijk statesthat the central task of discourse and conversational analysis is “to examinethe grammatical, stylistic, rhetorical, pragmatic, argumentative, interactional orother structures that define the various dimensions or levels of [. . . ] speech”(2006: 160). He goes on to argue for the consideration of “the social, political,institutional or cultural conditions and consequences” as equally verifiable andsignificant dimension of linguistic analysis. Although Van Dijk is right to men-tion the problem of documenting the socially-defined environments that makeup the “context” of speech, there is a compelling reason behind his interest inprompting us to consider these aspects of speech as documentable and thereforeanalyzable: to do so is to examine the dimensions of language that attest to thepower differentials. The negotiation of power is a reality that every human beingconfronts, and does so primarily through the use of language.

The widening purview of discursive analysis attests to the integral role oflanguage in everyday experience, and in this book, the study of a Mexican socialnetwork’s use of a particular discursive expressive form, builds on the idea thatevery study of discursive practice informs our understanding of the nature oflanguage and its role in informing – if not constituting – our lived experienceand our perception of, and therefore relation to, others.

This awareness of the depths of discourse analysis made the study that fol-lows somewhat daunting for me. Contrary to what might be expected, the fearwas not rooted in confronting the magnitude of language as a phenomenon (al-though there was certainly some of that as I will reveal in next few lines), but,instead, the fear was rooted in training the analytical lens on the community towhich I’m so utterly attached, and claiming to be ready to dissect it. Indeed, of allthe types of analysis that a person may engage in, perhaps the most rewarding –and daunting – is the type that involves a mirror, and the idea of examining,evaluating, and encapsulating ourselves is at once appealing and unnerving, forsuch tasks aim to reduce the magnitude of the object of study, unravel its com-plexity, and thus demystify it – something that we know to be hardly desirable, ifindeed possible, about ourselves. In my case, the prospect of analyzing the use ofproverbs as a discursive practice within a community of transnational1 Mexican

1 Transnationalism is used here to indicate that these immigrants maintain activeparticipation, ties, and alternating presence in their community of origin as well asin their host community.

Introduction 3

immigrants I have known most of my life, and to which I refer here as the Lopezsocial network,2 appeared initially to be a simple matter of looking at a patternmade up of defined features and explaining their overall effect. That apparentlystraightforward task was immediately complicated just as much by the standingargument of the last 20 years against ethnographic accounts being essentiallydiscursive exercises in the exoticizing (and commodifying) of the Other (Mar-vasti and Faircloth 2002; Van Maanen 1988: 22; Clifford and Marcus 1986), asit was by the somewhat prevailing notion that cultural introspection is suspect.

If the first challenge against ethnographic endeavors is that outsiders exploitthose unlike them by studying them, the second challenge suggests that insidersare too immersed in their own cultural processes to be reliable critics of them.

The first argument presupposes that an outsider who comes into a foreigncommunity and studies its ways will always end up presenting a reductive en-capsulation of both the people and their ways in a textual version of a reality thatattracts the general reading public with its promises of veracity, revelation, and ameasure of escapism or authoritative knowledge of – and thus over – the Other.That argument brings to mind the arm-chair anthropologist who, despite the lim-itations of his information, needed only to get a report from sea-faring visitorsto foreign lands to analyze the inhabitants’ beliefs and make an argument abouttheir civilization or lack thereof. The Other – the critics of the ethnographiceffort argue – is exploited and diminished in so far as the ethnographer embel-lishes the cultural distance between groups in order to make the textual accountmore appealing to the reading public (Sperber 1982: 180).

As a researcher engaging in ethnographic introspection, I am obviously trou-bled by such suggestions, as the furthest thing from my goals is to engage inshameless exploitation that dishonors not only the scholarly effort but more im-portantly the people who in the following pages allow a glance into one of themeans by which they maintain a degree of social cohesion in what was initially –and in some ways still is – a hostile and alienating host society for them. Addi-tionally, to consider the outsider’s perspective as somewhat more reliable thanthat of the insider seems intentionally perverse; especially when one considersthat virtually every modern ethnographer has sought something akin to the “in-sider’s perspective” in an effort to render a truly faithful understanding of thecultural practices under consideration. The etic perspective, we have learned,is never as effective as when it is complemented by the emic3 one, and good

2 All the names of the social network members referred to in this work are pseudonyms,as is the name of their home village in Mexico.

3 The terms “etic” and “emic” were coined by Kenneth Pike (1967) to differentiatebetween different ways of considering linguistic data; derived from the linguisticsterms “phonetic” and “phonemic,” which distinguish between actual sounds and

4 Introduction

ethnographers have shown us that those engaging in the practice should feelcompelled to make inquiries and test hypotheses in consultation with natives inorder to get “it” (i.e., meaning, and therefore understanding) right. To say, then,that native perspective should be transcended or held suspect for the sake of ob-jectivity or unfettered analysis seems at odds with the very goal of ethnographicresearch.

It was this concern, in part, that helped to shape the following ethnographi-cally-based analysis into what it is and brought about its marked stylistic devia-tion from its predecessors. While there are certainly some detailed descriptionsof situations, events, and people that were involved in the collection of the data,the aim of this ethnographic account is neither to present an exhaustive accountof the Mexican immigrant community on which it focuses, nor to claim thatmany of the community’s defining traits and concerns will be addressed.

In fact, this account focuses exclusively on the functions of a particulardiscursive practice in this community in order to theorize how language, culture,and thought intersect. By limiting the range of the data considered, the analysisproves to be much more practical in so far as it has greater applicability. Thatis, the analysis of the data presented here is much more about what society ingeneral loses when a particular social group’s language or discursive practicesare stifled or dismissed before the latter are examined in detail and evaluatedwithout bias, than it is about how a particular Mexican social network lives orhow it came to be.

The general aim of this book, then, is to show how complex even the mostcommon discursive practices generally are, and to suggest that the recognitionof such complexity argues against persistent attempts to devalue, ignore, oroutright condemn the discursive practices of ethnolinguistic minorities in orderto promote a “standard” or “educated” way of speaking that furthers a particularideology in the United States and ultimately alienates many of those for whomthe consequences of the discursive swap is too traumatic.

Growing up as a Mexican immigrant in Chicago, I personally experiencedthe conflict of discursive traditions that pitted my home language with that ofthe academy, and, as I made my way through school and daily public life, I

meaning-bearing sounds, the term “etic” alludes to empirical properties that areamenable to direct observation and replication, whereas the term “emic” alludes towhat is mentally recognizable as significant in sound production. For instance, aspeaker of English may choose to make a clicking sound after a particular vowelsound, which may be rendered phonetically in transcription of that speech, but otherspeakers of English will not ascribe a particular meaning-influencing function tothat clicking because it is not a phoneme – a linguistically significant sound – forthem.

Introduction 5

felt something akin to what New York literary and socio-cultural critic Nor-man Podhoretz calls “the brutal bargain” in his autobiography, Making It. Thebargain, as Podhoretz characterizes it, involves upward social mobility on thecondition that ethnic and working-class markers – and perhaps even social ties –are forsaken. During my youth, I felt that at almost every level of schooling Iwas forced to consider that the language I spoke at home (Spanish) was a hin-drance that I needed to jettison and that my ethnicity was a source of shame anddisempowerment because it marked me as an outsider.

It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how vile and destructive these atti-tudes were. My bilingualism was the opposite of a hindrance, but I did not learnthis until college, where, for instance, my familiarity with Latinate vocabularyhelped my literacy skills.Awareness of my ethnicity forced me to learn about thehistorical factors that have contributed to the disempowerment of Latinos andBlacks, as well as that of other ethnic minorities in the U.S. Thus, introspectionhas been for me not only a common practice but a requirement to confront thevarious forms of discrimination and cultural devaluation that my social networkfaced in the U.S. and which are, unfortunately, quite common social ills in thequotidian events that make up our lives in multi-ethnic societies.

Despite my opposition to the argument against introspection, when I considerhow my native status can be expected to compromise my critical distance to mysubject, I acknowledge that there is some legitimacy to the concern. I recognizethe danger of not noticing the unusual in what to me is the stuff of the everyday(for example, that Mexican parents sometimes address their young children inthe formal – rather than the common informal – second-person voice; or thatyounger members of the social network I studied sometimes quote proverbs tothe older members; or that honor and respect are not necessarily premised onwealth, or occupation, or even age). But to consider that there is no correctiveagainst insider blindness is tantamount to admitting that academic training is su-perseded by socialization – something that proved to be completely contradictedin my case, for, if nothing else, it was my academic training and driving curiositythat led me to question the “naturalness” of everything that characterized thebehavior of the Lopez social network, despite my involvement in it.

In fact, if there was a problem with introspection, it often seemed not to be amatter of sacrificing critical distance but of missing out on the joys of uncriticalparticipation. Several times I found myself thinking that I needed to jot downthe circumstances surrounding a proverb as soon as it was uttered, and analyzingthe situation, instead of enjoying the moment. During those times I felt as if Iwere truly of two minds – that of the participant and that of the observer – eachvying for control, and, alas, I also remember feeling genuinely resentful that theobserver always seemed to ruin the moment for me.

6 Introduction

The cultivation of a critical perspective oriented toward one’s communitydespite being an “insider” is not as unusual as it may seem, if we dispense withthe reification of the insider/outsider dichotomy as the foundational distinctionin ethnographic endeavors. Kirin Narayan (1993: 672), for one, observes thatsuch a dichotomy at the level of “culture” obfuscates how micro-level socialdistinctions “such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, or sheerduration of contacts may at different times outweigh the cultural identity weassociate with insider or outsider status.” The micro-level social identifiers arecertainly relevant in the consideration of meaning, as social context affectsnot only what is communicated but how that communication is interpreted.Not withstanding the myriad factors involved in the construction of context, orprecisely because there is the potential for a multiplicity of factors influencingmeaning, a researcher must be able to determine which factors are prominentenough to guide understanding and which are less so – or to put it another way,the task is to ascertain which signals and signifiers must be attended to andwhich may be deemed “background noise.” The ability to discern what sharedknowledge and which social factors are relevant is what may be termed culturalcompetence.

Nevertheless, Narayan’s pertinent observation about what makes one an in-sider/outsider in cultural terms, brings up to question the very notion of culture(what is it that is shared or not?). The short answer is that there are many gooddefinitions of culture, but not one on which there is consensus. Saeeda Shah(2004: 553–556) offers a brief list of notable sources presenting the variousdefinitions of culture, ranging from Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1952) compila-tion of 164 definitions at the time their book was published to Cheng’s (2000:209) definition of it as “a system of shared assumptions, beliefs, values, andbehaviour in a given group, community, or nation.” What is more, Shah givesher definition of the term in the following way:

[C]ulture is some sort of “social glue” which holds people together and makespeople perceive and define themselves(in spite of all other variations) as a culturalgroup in opposition to another cultural group or a perceived member of anothergroup, and which determines their interactional codes and patterns of behaviour.(Shah 2004: 555)

Although I agree that culture may be understood as “the social glue” that ensuresthe integrity of a community, Shah’s definition of culture in oppositional termscomes dangerously close to my working definition of “ethnicity” as a termindicating the subordinate status of a cultural group within an over-arching one.That is, ethnic groups may be defined by one or more social features (e.g.,language, rituals, mores, phenotype, national origin) that may be linked to the

Introduction 7

amorphous concept of culture, but the presence of those features alone doesnot necessarily lead to cultural exclusion from the over-arching group. It is thepresence of distinguishing social features set in oppositional juxtaposition tothose of the dominant socio-cultural group that marks an ethnic group; moreover,those distinguishing features are often vilified by the dominant group to justifyand thus perpetuate ethnic group subordination.

In order to understand how Mexican transnational immigrants negotiate theirplace in a contemporary cosmopolitan city such as Chicago, concepts such asethnicity and culture must be differentiated in this way to explain how transna-tional immigrants can be at once members of more than one cultural community(i.e., be, in effect, bicultural) without being fully integrated into either. Further-more, we may also gain insight into the concept of “culture” if – in accordancewith the spirit of this work which focuses on the analogical nature of proverbs –we think of it in terms of an analogy rather than in terms of denotation. JohnVan Maanen (1988: 3) makes what to my mind is an excellent analogy when herather glibly likens anthropology to biology. “[C]ulture,” he writes, is “a conceptas stimulating, productive, yet fuzzy to fieldworkers and their readers as the no-tion of life is for biologists and their readers.” If we accept the comparison, webegin to understand why “culture” is such an elusive, yet quite familiar, concept.Just as we tend to have a clear sense of what qualifies something as being alive(growth, metabolism, reproduction, response to stimuli) but do not know the in-trinsic cause of life, we have the sense that culture is all around us and consists offeatures such as beliefs, social behaviors, personal appearance, ways of speak-ing and communicating, ways of relating to our environment, ways of thinking(i.e., what assumptions may be made or inferences drawn) – but we still do notknow the intrinsic basis of culture. So cultural anthropology is like biology inits scientific approach to its object of study, particularly in its identification ofthe individual domains or features that constitute the complex whole.

One of the various domains that contribute to the understanding of the cul-tural whole is language-in-use (which takes context into account, as opposedto language in the abstract which focuses on language purely in terms of itssystematic properties). Within this domain, we find such subcategories as ver-bal art, and, below that, particular instances of it, such as proverbs. Focusingon proverb-use as an instantiation of the domain of language-in-use allows usto consider proverbs as social tools that are employed to carry out particularfunctions in common social interaction. Not only that, but by identifying thosefunctions we are closer to articulating why and how discourse comes to be anessential component of culture.

In fact, the conception of proverbs as social tools allowed me to identifyin such popular and unassuming expressions the tripartite combination of the

8 Introduction

prosodic, the figurative, and the social, which is a more concrete rendering ofthe abstract phenomena with which this book is concerned: language, thought,and culture. That is, in the mental processing of proverbs we witness a minormiracle of meaning-making; we see the impressive ability of the mind to relatea number of components – quite often in less than a second – in order to renderwhat appears to be an irrelevant comment into a pertinent and intelligible idea.

For instance, the processing of proverbs begins with the recognition that anutterance is indeed a proverb, and this is primarily the result of its prosody (think“language” here) which often consists of poetic elements:

– A friend in need is a friend in deed (repetition and rhyming)– Brain is better than brawn (alliteration)– If you lie down with dogs, [then] you get up with fleas (syntactic paral-

lelism and antithesis)

Then, the figurative nature of the expression makes it seem incompatible withthe context (and if the utterance is taken literally, it is); but with the deploymentof common cognitive (think “thinking” here) skills – such as mental recall,comparative thinking, generalizing, symbol recognition and reconfiguration –the implicit associations contained in the utterance are related to the context inwhich the proverb is uttered:

– It’s the pot calling the kettle black(Who’s the pot? Who’s the kettle? And what does one calling the other blackhave to do with anything?)

– A rolling stone gathers no moss(Who’s the stone? What is moss supposed to be? Is it good or bad that nomoss is gathered?)

– The early bird catches the worm(What’s the worm? And what does being early have to do with catching it?)

Finally, the social dimension (think “culture” here) emerges when we considerthat these cryptic expressions surely work against efficient communication un-less they are employed for a purpose that more transparent comments would failto execute:

– Let sleeping dogs lie(Why not simply say “don’t start trouble”?)

– Strike while the iron is hot(Why not simply say “when you’re ready to do something, don’t hesitate”?)

– You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink(Why not simply say “you can’t force others to do what’s good for them”?)

Introduction 9

On the assumption that proverbs are uttered to share rather than to withholdinformation from the addressee, we can say that proverbs are employed becausethey serve a function that the plain comments don’t quite fulfill.As has been sug-gested by Obeng (1996) and Domınguez Barajas (2005: 92), one such functionserved by proverbs is that of socialization. By virtue of granting the listenersthe opportunity to come to their own interpretation of a proverb’s meaning anda speaker’s intention in uttering it, the listeners become active participants inthe discursive enterprise. That is, rather than simply summarize a general ob-servation, proverbs involve listeners with their enigmatic character, which leadslisteners to assess the situation a particular proverb is called on to instantiate.This is particularly important in cases when the proverb is used to give adviceand in which the speaker of the proverb wants to respect the autonomy of therecipient of the proverb. But this is only one of several social functions of theproverb.

Another social function is the promotion of group solidarity by virtue ofidentifying shared referents in everyday interaction. In making reference toshared environments (both physical and psychological), people tend to recognizewho belongs in their group and who does not. But the shared environments mustconstantly be reconstructed psychologically because referents don’t necessarilyhold a constant meaning. Let us consider animals for example.Although we mayrecognize animals as concrete referents, not all of us might associate the sameideas with a referent such as “dog” for instance. In this case, while some of usmight be thinking “loyal, fun pet” others might be thinking “vulgar, despicable,cowardly” (as when the word “dog” is used as an insult), and even others mightthink “lascivious; promiscuous,” as the term is used in popular U.S. slang.

If concrete referents can be semantically ambiguous when they are usedfiguratively, we can only imagine how the ambiguity is exacerbated in relationto abstract referents, particularly those embodied in verbs, such as “to bond” or“to care for.” For example, does the word “bond” refer to the same thing whenmen “bond” and when atoms “bond”? Does “care” mean the same thing whenwe “care for one another” as when someone “handles things with care”?

Given the prevalence of referential and semantic ambiguity, it is importantfor members of a social group to ensure continuously that they interpret thingsin the same way because their solidarity depends on shared perception andunderstanding.

Shared meaning, then, is always a social and continuous activity, as Dan Sper-ber writes. In fact, Sperber (1996), while discussing folk-taxonomies, suggeststhat human beings are always engaging in taxonomic activity in an effort to con-ceptually manage their environment. The taxonomic effort leads to paradigmsthat are revealed in the popular expressions that people use. What this means

10 Introduction

in regard to proverbs is that when an expression takes on the quality or statusof “proverb” in a community, what is understood is that the expression has en-capsulated a general observation to which that community subscribes. When aliteral observation, such as “birds of a feather flock together,” takes on a pre-vailing figurative sense in a community, we understand that the community haselevated that observation to the level of “proverb” and therefore treats it as acategorical and evaluative tool (in fact, a taxonomic tool that helps to situate thestimulus that prompted the utterance in relation to established paradigms – inthis case, that shared traits lead to natural groupings).

Knowing those paradigms and the way to engage in their negotiation is a hall-mark of culture as a practice. Figurative expressions, popular “sayings,” jokes,riddles, greetings – practically any discursive practice has a cultural foundationbehind it that renders it intelligible and socially functional. Just as knowing themeanings of individual words is not enough to know how language functionssystematically, knowing the language of a social group is not enough to under-stand how that group uses language to promote collective behavior; for that weneed to consider how culture, language, and thought interact.

The interaction of these profoundly human features is itself currently encap-sulated in the idea of discourse. For this reason, discourse analysis has tran-scended disciplinary barriers to become a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. Forinstance, scholars in the fields of management and organization studies, Phillipsand Hardy (2002) provide a definition of discourse that speaks to the theoreticalpotential and ambitious nature of such an analytical approach. Their definitionis therefore worth quoting fully:

Discourse, in general terms, refers to actual practices of talking and writing(Woodilla 1998). Our use of the term is somewhat more specific: We define adiscourse as an interrelated set of texts, and the practices of their production,dissemination, and reception that brings an object into being (Parker 1992). Forexample, the collection of texts of various kinds that make up the discourse ofpsychiatry brought the idea of an unconscious into existence in the 19th century(Foucault 1965). In other words, social reality is produced and made real throughdiscourses, and social interactions cannot be fully understood without referenceto the discourses that give them meaning. (Phillips and Hardy 2002: 3)

Once discourse is understood as more than simply the exchange of informationthrough speech, but it is instead seen as an epistemological social practice –one that involves selecting, adjusting, and negotiating referents and their sig-nificance – the interpenetration of discourse and culture becomes so apparentand enlightening that it can be considered a defining aspect of culture and,therefore, a key locus of cultural analysis. Recognizing what amounts to theinterpenetration of language, thought, and culture while studying the Australian

Introduction 11

Aboriginal culture, Klapproth (2004) proposes that we should think of cultureas a “web of discourses,” which puts language and communication at the centerof social behavior. The idea is in line with Geertz’s (1973: 5) notion of cultureas a semiotic system that can be analyzed by means of interpretive anthropol-ogy, but, whereas, Geertz leaves the prominence of communication implied andforegrounds the symbolic elements to be analyzed by alluding to Max Weber’s“webs of significance” as the guiding idea, Klapproth alerts us with the phrase“web of discourses” not only to the role communication plays in the fashioningof a culture by virtue of being the wellspring of significance, but also to thestructural properties that enable the wellspring to function as it does. For in-stance, Klapproth rightly observes that conceiving of culture as communication“implies two important and mutually related notions, namely, first that cultureis a system of signs (i.e., a system of cognitive representations of the world),and secondly, that it must be communicated in order to be lived [. . . ]. Suchan approach to cultural theory sees culture therefore not simply as cognitiveknowledge residing exclusively in people’s minds but includes in its concep-tion of culture the practices and processes by which such knowledge is used,exchanged and put into action” (Klapproth 2004: 35–36).

In a cultural analysis that seeks to interpret what is significant for the partic-ipants involved, the functional aspect of utterances and other means of commu-nication, therefore, is just as important as the referential content such utterancesmay convey. Content itself, it must be acknowledged, is subject to interpretation,and interpretation is in turn guided by a socially-particular system of signs withits attendant conceptual moorings – in a word: discourse. That many discoursesinteract with and intersect one another in the life of any given individual issomething that must always be kept in mind, as it would be only in the rarest ofcases (e.g., isolationist groups; captives) that one would be insulated from com-peting discourses and have only one interpretive system by which to evaluatewhat is perceived. In either case, whether the individual attends to competingdiscourses or professes an affinity for one, the role of discourse remains thesame: it is the means by which reality is constructed in so far as the discursivesystem deployed delimits the ideas, the language, the attitudes, the behaviors,the sentiments, and evaluations of the individual in regard to what is perceivedand experienced.

In Sabean’s (1984) historical analysis of the transformation of an agrarianvillage into an urban class-based community in Germany we have a concreteexample of how discourse directly influences social reality. Sabean links theproduction and maintenance of community to the discursive act rather than toexternal realities. Borrowing ethnography’s methodological consideration of thelocal and empirical to identify patterns informing broader contexts, Sabean sees